Adata chairman says DRAM shortage will last another 10 years — dismisses AI bubble talk until ‘2040 or 2050’

Adata chairman Simon Chen (Chen Li-bai) said the global DRAM shortage will run for another 10 years and that talk of an AI bubble is premature, according to a Commercial Times report. Chen made the comments after Taiwanese stocks slumped in the wake of TSMC’s record second-quarter results, a selloff that revived concerns about overheated AI investment. The same report carries Adata’s forecast that DRAM contract prices will climb another 20% to 30% in the third quarter, with NAND flash rising 35% to 40%.

Electricity, particularly green power, and memory will be the world’s two scarcest resources over the next decade, Chen told Commercial Times. He rejected the argument that Meta and other cloud providers renting out spare compute capacity prove investment has overshot demand. Chen countered that AI applications will spread across business, government, and consumer markets, and that analysts who judge the cycle from short-term capital spending or a single company’s utilization rate underestimate long-term demand.

Beyond data centers, he pointed to robots, driverless vehicles, unmanned factories and stores, smart homes, and low-Earth-orbit satellites, a pool of edge devices he said could reach tens of billions of units. He also said that the industry can revisit the bubble question after 2030, to “discuss whether the AI bubble will happen in 2040 or 2050,” per the report.

Meanwhile, memory makers aren’t standing still on capacity. SK hynix raised a record $26.5 billion in its U.S. IPO this month to fund HBM manufacturing expansion, Nanya plans to quadruple capital spending to $6.2 billion in 2027, and China’s CXMT is reportedly approaching Micron-scale DRAM output this year.

Chen argues that none of it loosens the market, and that the big three suppliers learned from past downturns and will expand cautiously rather than repeat the disorderly capacity races that cratered prices in earlier cycles. At the same time, Chinese makers remain constrained by restricted access to semiconductor equipment and multi-year fab construction timelines. On that basis, he said current talk of supply and demand easing has no solid foundation, and he expects prices and module-maker profits to keep rising through the second half.

Chen’s forecasts align with his company’s balance sheet. Adata had stockpiled more than NT$30 billion in chip inventory by late February and was among the Taiwanese module makers that raised roughly $880 million in debt and share placements to keep buying chips, so every quarter of rising contract prices lifts the value of what it already holds. Back in October, he said the simultaneous shortage of DRAM, NAND, SSDs, and hard drives was the first he’d seen in 30 years in the industry, and DRAM contract prices have since risen as much as 171% year over year.